House Majority Whip shot at congressional baseball field

[*michaelsean*]

(06-16-2017, 04:55 PM)Dill Wrote: I don't find "recognizing jackasses on both sides" to be particularly helpful, though it is certainly better than supposing only one side has jackasses.  The most that could follow from this recognition is an exhortation to both sides to "stop it," the sort of admonition which rarely works. (Though I don't say "never".) But the claim is useless in helping anyone understand how we got to the current impasse between Democrats and Republicans.

In all my years of following politics, I have seen no evidence that one party is more partial to sex or corruption scandals than the other. Both sides certainly do it, and with a frequency which makes it hard to claim one does more than the other. Further, one can always find facebook posters or media commentators or an occasional Representative who says something odious, racist, sexist or whatever on either side.

But in my view, there is still a question of scale and of qualitative difference, and of origins. Saying that "all politicians lie" hardly captures the radical change in political rhetoric and behavior established by Trump at the national level. There are things that "both sides" don't do to nearly the same degree, practices I don't see both doing, and practices which began with one side, not the other. I don't think much will change without more specific criticism tied to examples and dates, and a re-affirmation of critical standards.

Just to provide three examples of what I am talking about:

1) in 1996, Newt Gingrich put out a memo to his fellow Republicans which contained a kind of lexicon of positive words for Republican policies and extreme and pejorative adjectives to be integrated into any discussion of "opponents." http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4443.htm. And it was at this point, during the successive fruitless Clinton scandals, that the national political rhetoric changed towards its present heading, became qualitatively different from anything since WWII.

2) in 2000, Karl Rove devised "push polls" to discredit John McCain. The goal of such polls is not to gather information, but to plan negative information about a candidate--in this case, the suggestion that McCain had an illegitimate black child.

3) In 2016, as mainstream news organizations sought to fight fake news by publishing primers and re-affirming journalistic standards, Fox and friends went the other direction, embracing the term "fake news" and applying it in blanket form to the MSM, a tactic then quickly adopted by the current president. The point of this was not accurate description but uncritical, wholesale delegitimization of competing viewpoints via a permanent label. It was also their way of affirming "Both sides" do fake news, though both sides were not.

I should also add that the three examples above speak to organizational/institutional tactics, not simply the views of one individual. They had to be validated by groups of people in charge of the organization and then implemented. In each case the tactic established an organizational standard. The tactics have created some pressure on Democrats to adopt them to compete, but for the most part Dems have refused or discovered such tactics don't cross the aisle well.

Comparing anecdotes is certainly an exercises in futility which offers no basis for recognizing organizational tactics or national shifts in such tactics. But placing political behavior in an analytic framework that allows for systematic comparison, and recognition and elimination of double standards, does allow one to get a more secure grasp of the social causes of political extremism and so some chance of realistically addressing them.

Do you are saying in example one that you believe suggesting a lexicon is something unique to Republicans? And you are saying you searched the internet, and came up with nothing the left does that compares to lexicons and push polls?